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What is something unique/quirky
about you? I
have a really strong innate sense of time. Without looking at a clock, at any
time of the day or night, I can usually guess the time within five minutes,
often right down to the second. It’s a totally useless skill but I wrote it
into a novelette I wrote about time travelers. Having that skill—I called it
“chrono-sense”—was a prerequisite into getting into the program.

Tell us something really
interesting that's happened to you! When I was editor of Orange
Coast magazine in California, I got to pilot the Goodyear blimp, which is
moored in a facility right by the 405 (San Diego) freeway. I used to pass it on
my daily commute. A professional handled the “take off,” which was basically
just unhooking the nose of the blimp from the little stand it was attached to
and then the command over to me. You steer it with foot pedals like a paddle
boat and little steering yoke. What surprised me the most was that it was very,
very noisy. That joyride was possibly the most fun things I’ve ever done.

Where were you born/where did you grow
up? I was born on an Army post just outside of Washington, D.C. My father
was an Army lawyer, so I was in the enviable position of spending much of my
childhood in Europe, first in Germany and then in France. I was so little when
we first went to Germany that I was bilingual by the time we came back to the
U.S. I’ve forgotten most of the German (except for some nursery rhymes), but I
picked up French and have kept up with that. The really wonderful thing about
growing up an Army brat is that my father got a month of paid vacation a year
and he and my mother used it to travel. They took us with them, so I got to
visit places as a child that would otherwise be on my bucket list.

If you knew you'd die tomorrow,
how would you spend your last day? While I don’t want to die any time soon, the abstract concept of
death doesn’t frighten me. My parents died within a year of each other when I
was in my early thirties. My little sister died ten years ago. I believe there
is an afterlife and I have people waiting for me there. So I would spend the
day in celebration. I would grab my best friend and my passport and go to the
warmest place I’ve never been. Doesn’t have to be a beach, it just has to be
warm. There are many such places on my bucket list. There would also be much
eating and drinking of good things. I’m a diabetic who controls my condition
with strict eating and am essentially symptom-free as a result. Which means I
haven’t had a slice of bread or a potato in almost a decade. I like bread. I
LOVE potatoes. There would definitely be bread and butter. And potatoes. There
would definitely be dessert. I would try parasailing. I’ve always been afraid
of heights, but if I’m going to die anyway, what’s to be afraid of? I’d go
snorkeling. I’d watch the sunset. I’d count my blessings. And then I’d let go.

Who is your hero and why? Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I am the
black sheep in a family filled with lawyers—my grandfather, my father, my
brother, my sister-in-law, my cousin. Even when I was working as an editor at a
large city magazine in California, my father would say, “It’s not too late to
go to law school.” (Preferably in Virginia where he lived so that I’d be a lot
closer.) I admire the way she understands both he letter of the law and the
spirit of it. I admire her feminism. I admire her intellect. I admire the way
she has managed to have a balanced life—a wonderful love story with her
husband, raising a family, having outside interests.

What are you passionate about
these days?
My parents were both activists. My father’s specialty (even as an Army lawyer)
was civil rights. My mother was a newspaper columnist who wrote on 70s social
issues that still resonate, including right-to-choose. I have always been a
liberal but for the last few years, that liberalism has been ramped up to
eleven. I am passionate about getting common sense gun laws in this country. It’s
not just abstract, it’s personal. Remember the D.C. snipers, Lee Boyd Malvo and
John Muhammad? They drove around randomly shooting people, including one woman
who was just gassing up her car. Her name was Lori Ann Louis-Rivera and she was
a friend of my brother’s. Remember the San Bernardino shooting in 2015 that
left 14 dead? One of the dead was a friend of a good friend. Remember the
shooting spree in Vegas during a country musical festival? My oldest friend in
California was there. She escaped unharmed. That shooting at a McDonald’s in
Alabama near Auburn University? One of my fellow Rite To Reign authors was in that fast food restaurant just before
the shooting started. “Gun control” is such a hot-button issue that people
can’t even be rational about it anymore. If you even bring up the topic, people
begin making assumptions about why you want to “take away the guns.” But here’s
the thing. I grew up in a household with a gun. When I was a teenager, I
learned how to shoot rifles and was good enough to compete, though I never did.
When I started working for Joel Silver, one of Hollywood’s most prolific action
movie producers, I went to the gun range to get a feel for the weapons that
were in every script we worked on. I’m a good shot, as it turns out. (And those
gun range experiences definitely showed up in my fiction—especially the time
the dweeby little guy in the next lane pulled out a case with a Desert Eagle
inside. The Desert Eagle is a REALLY BIG GUN. One version has a ten-inch
barrel. It took everything I had not to say, “Compensating for something?” The
slaughter in schools sickens me. I have friends with little kids who have to go
through “active shooter” drills. Seriously? And thinking of the parents of the
little kids slaughtered in Sandy Hook who were brushed off by their political
representatives who said they really couldn’t do anything about what happened.
SERIOUSLY???? But I rant. I wrote an essay for Disarm, a gun sense anthology that has probably only sold about a
dozen copies. I don’t make a lot of money, but if you’ve got a charity
anthology, you’ve got my support, as a writer, as a reader, as a buyer. (And I
also have a nice collection of political t-shirts.) This is not a time in
America to be disengaged.

What do you do to unwind and
relax? I watch
movies. I used to see everything. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I probably
saw four or five movies a week. I used to live next to a grungy old theater
that offered double features for a dollar. My roommate and I would go and fill
up on their cheap popcorn. Then there were the dollar movies at the L.A. Museum
of Art—they’d do themed festivals of rom coms or “movies before the Code, or
films noir. Plus there were free screenings and test screenings and the plus
one tickets people always had. Writer’s Guild members can use their WGA cards
to get into free screenings on the weekends and one of my friends used to lend
me his card. (They didn’t really check the names back then.) Plus I reviewed
movies for a couple of different websites that are all gone now, unfortunately.
I’m pretty easy to please when it comes to my entertainment. I like
character-driven, issues-oriented dramas as much as I like Avengers movies. I own a couple of movies that I’ll turn to when I
need a laugh, like Galaxy Quest or Saving Grace or Zoolander. A movie I missed in the theaters but can’t wait to see
is Oceans 8, because I read the
script and thought it was hilarious and I love all the women in the cast. (It’s
been out on DVD since September but I’ve been buried in deadlines.) I love
movies. Which is a good thing because my day job is reading scripts and books
for a number of Hollywood production companies and producers. I’ve been working
with the same group of people for more than two decades doing what my grandmother
once described as “writing book reports for a living.” That’s how I pay my
rent. It is the Best. Job. Ever.

Stuff about the Book:

What inspired you to write this book?
The theme of the boxed set is “royal witches.” I was intrigued by the idea of
taking an historical figure and making her a witch because I love urban
fiction. I thought of Queen Elizabeth the first but was drawn to Catherine the
Great because I’ve had an idea for a trilogy of stories in which the
Romanov/Communist dynamic plays out with fairies and humans, with the Romanovs
being the “feya,” which is the
Russian word for fairy. The time frame of the books would go from just before
the Revolution into Putin’s Russia and Catherine’s story would be a sort of
prequel.

Can you tell us a little bit
about the characters in The Secret Hexe? The title character, the secret
witch in the story, is the German princess Sophie who becomes Catherine the
Great. She’s surrounded by a number of real-life people, her mother Johanna
(who did not love her), Empress Elizabeth of Russia, Grand Duke Peter, her
husband, and King Frederick of Prussia (Frederick the Great). Even the
character of Babette, Sophie’s nurse/governess, was taken from real life. I
also used (more or less) the historical record in constructing these
characters’ relationships to each other. Grand Duke Peter was a man-child who
preferred playing with his collection of tin soldiers to having sex with his
wife. (At one point in their marriage, he suggested she dress as a soldier to
see if it would rouse his enthusiasm.)

The other
characters were just people I made up, like the were-bear who becomes one of
Catherine’s allies and the Russian witch who is inserted into her household in
St. Petersburg to help her. I did a lot of research on Russian names and
culture to fill out the details of these minor characters. I have a tendency to
fall in love with supporting characters and in this book one of my favorite
characters was Arkady Lebedev, the were-bear. He’s only in one scene but I
imagined him as being played by Brian Blessed or Brian Cox—this kind of
over-sized character—a giant version of the dwarf Gimli.

I had been
intrigued by Catherine before I started the book, I became fascinated by her as
my research continued. My book ends the night after her wedding, more than a
decade before she becomes Empress, but even before she took the throne, she was
known to be an advocate for ending capital punishment, for the education of
women, and for Enlightenment ideas. But at the same time, some of her pronouncements
sound very Putin-esque. For example, one of her most-quoted lines is, “The only
way I can protect my borders is to expand them.” So I loved writing Catherine
and charting her journey as she seizes the power she feels destined to wield.

Who designs your book covers? It depends. I buy a lot of
pre-mades—sometimes from designers on Book Cover Designer, sometimes from
designers with big names and followings, like Ravven and Lou Harper of Cover
Designs. I also have a friend who barters book covers for beta reads and she’s
done a ton of covers for me. But I stockpile covers and actually use them as
story prompts. I have a LOT of covers for work I won’t be able to write until
2020 or so. The cover I currently have for Secret
Hexe was designed by a guy who calls himself betibup. I’ve bought about
half a dozen covers from him for the short stories and novellas I’ve put up on
Amazon as “short reads.” It’s a little generic, so when I publish it as a
stand-alone, I’ll probably get something custom.

What can we expect from you in
the future?
I have an urban fantasy trilogy—Brotherhood of Stone—coming out in early 2019.
The prequel novelette, Vaikus,
published at the end of October. It’s about gargoyles and I have a whole
mythology built up around who the gargoyles are and what their mission is. I
also have a follow-up to my novel Magic
in the Blood, Santa Muerte, new
this fall. They’re part of a series I call “La Bruja Roja” (the Red Witch), set
in a border town in Texas. The heroine is a young Mexican-American woman who
has inherited her grandmother’s power as a bruja, or witch. I have several
other projects going, including a charity anthology I edited for All Due
Respect Books. It’s a collection of fiction, non-fiction, and poems built
around the them of “immigration,” called Strangers
in a Strange Land. I’m very proud of that book, and will probably do other,
similar themed anthologies in the future. Other than that, just expect MORE.
After all, I already have all those covers!!

Did you learn anything during the
writing of your recent book? I learned that an outline really can be your
best friend. I’d always worked from a loose “structure” but it wasn’t always a
solid outline. I outlined Secret Hexe, though, and it saved my life. One day I
turned out a marathon 10K words. I’d never hit that benchmark before—I think my
personal best was 5K. Outlines really do up your productivity and they don’t
kill your creativity, which is what I’d always feared.

Anything specific you want to
tell your readers?
Thank you.

How did you come up with name of this
book (Secret Hexe)? I wanted to
use the word “witch” but I didn’t want to be too “on-the-nose” about it. I
found out the German word for Witch is HEXE, the root word four English word
“hex” or “spell.” So since Catherine the Great was really German, I thought it
would be a great word to use in the title. And “Secret” because it’s a secret
that she’s a witch. I like the title, but my best friend, a USA TODAY
bestselling novelist, absolutely despises it. So…I’d love to hear what other
people think.

If your book had a candle, what
scent would it be?
I love this question. It would probably smell like Chanel’s “Russian Leather,”
a sensual scent with hints of amber and exotic woods, maybe a hint of dark
tobacco. Catherine hated the “Oriental” influences she found at the Russian
court, so she would not have worn one of those heavily aromatic scents, no
matter how gorgeous. But she might have approved a scent that evoked the dark
fir and bright birch Russian forests, especially in winter, all covered with
sparkling snow, something you might find in the archives of Black Phoenix
Alchemy Lab’s perfumes. Or something like Thymes’ “Forest Birch” candle.

Stuff about Writing/ Reading:

What are your top 10 favorite
books/authors? Stephen King is my favorite writer and his book The Stand is a modern classic. He is
fantastic with characters. I also really like Robert McCammon, whose Swan Song is the second-best
post-apocalyptic novel ever written. The late, great Tanith Lee! I loved the
way she worked with words, piling them on top of each other like an artist uses
oil paints. She was gone much too soon. The first book by her I ever read was
Kill the Dead, a novella paired up with her vampire story Sabella in a Science Fiction Book Club offering called Sometime
After Sunset. I loved that story so much I promptly read every single thing
she’d written up to that point. Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series turned
me on to urban fantasy. Those books were so much fun. I am also a huge fan of
Sharyn McCrumb’s Appalachian ballad mysteries and her stand-alone book, St. Dale. Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie
Plum series is another favorite. I love the mixture of crime and romance. I am
in awe of the stylistic genius of Joan Didion and when I was in high school I
tried very hard to write the way she did in Slouching
Toward Bethlehem. I am a huge fan of the non-fiction writers Sebastian
Junger, John McPhee, and Erik Larson—not just Devil in the White City but Isaac’s
Storm and In the Garden of Beasts.
And last but not least, I’m a genuine Shakespeare geek. I loved that he made up
words when he couldn’t find one to suit. (Did you know he invented the word
“umbrella?”) The first Shakespeare play I ever saw was not one of the usual, it
was Coriolanus and I was hooked. My favorites are The Tempest, Macbeth, and
Coriolanus. And Much Ado About Nothing, because I’m a sucker for a happy ending..

How long have you been writing? I
have been writing since elementary school. I had my first professional by-line the
day before I turned seventeen. (Yes, I’m still very proud of that.) I’ve been
writing fiction since 2007. Before that I had written a few screenplays but had
never tried straight-out fiction. Then one day I went to a medical appointment
with a friend and we were there for HOURS. It was really hot in the waiting
room and it was crowded and I hadn’t brought anything to read, so while my
friend went in and out of various offices, I just started writing a story. I
then submitted it to a contest and won second prize--$100. It was called “Just
Another Day in Paradise” and it became the title story in my first collection
of stories written under my own name. (I write crime fiction and horror as
“Katherine Tomlinson,” fantasy and science fiction and urban fiction as “Kat
Parrish,” and cozy romance and mystery as “Katherine Moore.” I wrote a LOT of
short stories the first few years, nearly all of them crime fiction. A couple
of years ago, I began to transition to longer work. I honestly thought I’d
never be able to reach a 40K threshold.

Do the characters all come to you at the
same time or do some of them come to you as you write? I almost always
begin my story with a character. Sometimes a story will start with the
concept—I have a dystopian tale coming out called Blind Tithe that I created from the inside out and had to build the
characters out. For Magic in the Blood,
I started with the idea that if magic were real, people in the border towns
being devastated by narco violence, could go to a witch and get help. And that
let me to Aixa Riley, my heroine, who was born in Mexico, raised in the US, and
back in the small town of her birth just as a cartel moves into town, protected
by a very powerful dark force.

What kind of research do you do
before you begin writing a book? I tend to do my research in two phases. When I first decided I
was going to be writing about Catherine the Great, I ordered a bunch of books
to supplement what I could find on Wikipedia and so forth. (any excuse to buy
books.) I had read Eva Stachniak’s wonderful novels about Catherine (highly
recommended to anyone who loves historical fiction) and loved them, but I
didn’t really know that much about the real Catherine. So I used the books to
get an idea of her basic character and the “big events” of her life. Then, once
I started writing, I had to do constant research. I wanted to use the word
“lickspittle” to describe a minor character. But I had to make sure the word
was actually in use in the mid-19th century. I checked on details of Russian feasts.
I found out what Catherine the Great’s favorite dish was—sturgeon and champagne
soup—and what she liked to drink. And on and on. It was great fun but research
can be a rabbit hole. You start looking at one thing and before you know it,
you’ve just read an article on something called sea silk. (A surprisingly
engaging topic!)

Do you see writing as a career? Yes.
I worked in magazines and newspapers before I segued over to my current gig as
a “story analyst” (the movie industry’s term for “reader”). I’ve written
screenplays, including two for movies that were made, and one produced
television episode, and one produced web series pilot. I’ve ghost-written
dozens of “how to” books as a side hustle when things were lean on the script
side. (Reading is a seasonal thing—the whole industry shuts down from about
Thanksgiving to Superbowl Sunday.) What I would like to do is make a living
from my fiction writing. I know it can be done but I’m not there yet.

Do you read yourself and if so
what is your favorite genre? I am a reader. I’ve had a library card since I could first sign
my name to a card. I used to keep a journal of what I read with little notes on
each book but after I filled the journal, I stopped. Now I post reviews on
GoodReads to keep track. I read for a living, which gives me access to a wider
range of books than I might pick to read myself. My favorite genres are urban
fantasy, paranormal romance, and mystery or any mix of them. I started a
mystery book club when I moved away from L.A. as a way to meet people and we’re
now in our third year. I wouldn’t normally read a lot of “literary fiction” but
for my job I’ve read some great books. I’m currently recommending Peng
Shepherd’s debut novel The Book of M.
She does amazing things with point of view. I was also dazzled by the highly
praised Sweetbitter, a coming of age
novel about a young woman in New York learning her way around fine food and
wine while working at a restaurant. It really is as good as you’ve heard.
Jeanette Winterson’s Shakespeare retelling The
Gap of Time led me to her other works, including the classic, Sexing the
Cherry. She is a masterful stylist. So while I have favorite genres, I’m really
pretty omnivorous. I don’t read comic books or graphic novels, though. The form
baffles me—especially when you have to read sideways and counter-clockwise to
get what’s going on. I did read some of Neil Gaiman’s early stuff for work, and
it was lovely, but I prefer his later novels.

Do you prefer to write in silence
or with noise? Why?
I spent my college years in an insanely noisy dormitory so I can block out
almost any kind of noise. Which is a good thing because where we live now, we
have a neighbor who likes to do projects that involve saws cutting metal and
lots and lots of hammering. Accompanied by music played at ear-bleed levels.
(He’s not being obnoxious, he’s partially deaf.) Before that, I lived in an
apartment on one of Los Angeles’ busiest streets and my windows were always
open because I hate air conditioning. At this point, I don’t think I could work
in silence. The one thing I can’t do is listen to music with words. Soundtracks
yes, but if music has lyrics, it distracts me. I also can’t listen to stations
like NPR because I get too caught up in the stories. (I never can listen to
audio books when I’m driving either. I get too engrossed in the story and find
I’m not paying enough attention to the driving.)

Pen or type writer or computer?
Both. I carry a notebook with me everywhere in case I get a story idea while
I’m out and about. But every time I start a new project, I open one of those
“composition notebooks” you can buy. In it I jot down ideas and sometimes stray
bits of dialogue. Sometimes character sketches. I know I could do all that on
the computer, but sometimes I have ideas after I’ve shut the computer off for
the night and I don’t want to lose them or scratch them out on random bits of
paper. But also, I once wrote a whole novella longhand when my computer died
over a long weekend and I couldn’t get the part I needed to fix it. It took me
a day to transcribe it when my computer was back in action.

What made you want to become an author
and do you feel it was the right decision? I never really “decided” to
become an author. I know that as far back as childhood, I wanted to earn a
living as a writer, although back then, that meant working for a newspaper and
breaking some great story. But the thing about newspaper writing is that you
get the who, what, and where but until the modern hybrid opinion/journalism
started happening, you never really got the “why.” I was always interested in
the “why.” I’d always made up stories for my own amusement. When I was a child,
I shared a bedroom with my little sister, who was an insomniac from the day she
was born. I would tell her stories to lull her to sleep. So telling stories to
a bigger audience just seemed natural. And after winning that contest with my
very first “professional” short story, I was as hooked as any opioid addict. I
write nearly every day unless the day job work is so crazy I fall into bed
exhausted. I understand now why writers continue series for ten, twenty, thirty
stories. You do fall in love with your characters and you want to know what’s
going to happen to them. Plus, writing can be a great escape. My sister died
the year I sold my first short story and I worked through my grief in fiction.
One of the reviewers of my first collection of stories said that she thought
they were well-written but depressing. She was right. I’ve since lightened up,
but it was a tough time for a while. My tax returns say I’m a writer/editor.
When I fill out a contribution form and am asked what I do for a living, the
answer is the same. It’s part of my identity now.

Advice they would give new authors?
Write. Write as much as you can. Stephen King likes to say it takes writing a
million words before you really know what you’re doing, so get those million
words in. I’d say, “Don’t limit yourself.” If you want to write a space opera
with androids and zombies, go for it. If you really want to write a historical
novel about someone no one’s ever heard of, follow your passion. Nothing is
ever wasted. You’ll learn your craft and you’ll feel the thrill of
accomplishment. I’d even say write fan fic if you’re interested in that. One of
the most successful indie authors I know—she makes close to seven figures a
year—started out writing fan fiction. Enjoy yourself. And while you’re writing
those million words, you’ll realize that you’re drawn to some subjects and
concepts and themes. You’ll find your voice. Yes, read the books. By all means
take the classes. And keep reading. There are so many great books out there
that will help you hone your craft. But the best thing you can do is write.

What are common traps for
aspiring writers?
Not trusting yourself. You really have to be a little arrogant when you first
start out. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t have your work edited and proofed
and beta read. But too much feedback, especially at first, can be paralyzing. I
worked with a writer who was a very good storyteller but not so good with the
actual writing. She came to me for a developmental edit after getting back a
manuscript so full of track changes notes (five or six on every sentence) that
the pages were unreadable. She needed “meta notes” before we got to the nitty
gritty. And working that way, she was able to find her story and create an
incredibly moving story with fantastic characters and a gorgeous sense of
place. But she was convinced her work was terrible. Another trap is getting
caught up in “the next big thing.” The best example is all the “billionaire
bondage books” that came out in the wake of Fifty
Shades. But there are so many trends—dragon shifters and reverse harem and
all the books with “Origins” in their titles. It can be frustrating sometimes
to look at the bestseller lists and see so many books that are not very good
but that are selling because they somehow got caught up in a wave. (And yes, I
realize “not very good” is a subjective judgment.) So there’s the temptation to
write the Billionaire Scotsman Were-Bear
Firefighter’s Wife and cross your fingers and hope for the best. In
general, I think it’s a bad idea to try to chase trends. I see it in my day job
all the time. You’ll see an article in the New Yorker and three weeks later, a
script about the topic of the article will land on my virtual desk. (That’s how
we ended up with two movies about Truman Capote and a movie and a miniseries
about the kidnapping of J. Paul Getty’s grandson.) The other thing is that
there are a lot of predators out there selling expensive “publishing packages”
or courses that purport to help writers take a shortcut to success. There are
well-established professionals—like Mark Dawson and Rebecca Hamilton and Joanna
Penn—who know what they’re talking about and give value for money, but there
are a lot of pretenders and when you’re just starting out, it’s hard to separate
the signal from noise, the winners from the wannabees. It’s appalling to see
people offering thousand dollar packages to format a book, when you can get
people on Fiverr to do it for less than a hundred dollars if you can’t do it
yourself. So watch out for predators. Trust yourself. And finally, there’s the
trap of talking about the book so much you never actually get around to writing
it. We ALL know that person. S/he had a great idea…five years ago…but
something’s always gotten in the way. And there are always excuses. There’s no time to write. (I’m kind of
unsympathetic about that one. How much television do you watch a day? If you
watch TV, you have time to write.) It’s okay to brainstorm with people. It’s
okay to share ideas. But don’t let that be the only creative thing you do. You
have to actually write to be a writer.

How long on average does it take you to
write a book? There is no average. One summer when day job work was slow, I
ended up working for a content mill. For three months I churned out one 40K
how-to book every three days for the princely sum of $100. The pace almost
killed me and I still earned barely enough to pay my rent. I started one book
back in 2013 and I’ll finally finish it this year. For next year, I’ve
challenged myself to completing a novel a month. (Assuming a novel is 40k. I’m
not quite ready to attempt 60K in one month.) On alternate months, I intend to
write novella-length “episodes” of various series I want to “try out” to see if
they catch fire. I have some cozy romance ideas (and already have four covers)
so those will be the first. I’ve outlined them all and am going to try to write
all four “books” in one month. Probably won’t get much else done. I sometimes
have trouble with work/life balance but…I feel like gathering momentum is the
key and the key to momentum, at least right now, is finishing more books.

Do you believe in writer’s block? I know a lot of writers who
suffer from writer’s block and I’ve come to believe that it’s more of a
confidence issue than anything else. I have a friend who’s a terrific writer
but she’ll analyze what she’s writing to death. And the more she analyzes it,
the more she hates it and the result is she doesn’t write very much. But I came
to fiction with a reporter’s mindset. There’s no writer’s block in journalism.
If you don’t write your story, you’re out of a job. I spent a year working for
aol.com as a writer-in-residence, creating weekly chapters of a serial novel.
Halfway through the gig, AOL wanted twice-weekly instalments. There were times
I uploaded the stories just hours before they ran, but I never missed a
deadline. Because I couldn’t.

What is your writing Kryptonite? Distraction of any kind is the
bane of a writer’s existence, especially when we’re juggling multiple tasks and
multiple roles and multiple deadlines. For me, the absolute biggest distraction
is the news. I’m a former reporter and a lifetime news junkie and no matter
what side of the political divide you’re on, the news cycle right now is
constant and it’s never boring. If there’s something unusual going on—a
hurricane approaching Florida, where my brother lives—or something
controversial, like the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, I constantly
click away from whatever I’m writing to see what’s happening on CNN or Yahoo
news or the BBC or whatever. I have wasted hours doing that. And unlike email,
which you can click off, I can’t really turn off the internet because I am
always fact-checking or looking something up for my writing. (Research can be a
huge time-suck too but it’s RESEARCH!!!)

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